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Presenting the Nokia N95 8GB.

Note:

Turn off the background audio first at the bottom of the page before clicking the play button.

Nokia N95 8GB commercial.

More than a year after I last upgraded my main phone, I'm at it again, and my cellphone of choice now is none other than the flagship of Nokia's Nseries, the Nokia N95 8GB.

While my old Nokia N70 was a mere evolution of the venerable Series 60 platform, the N95 takes mobile phones to a whole new level with a feature list significantly longer than any other high-end phone on the market today.

For starters, it's a quad-band 3G phone. No, make that a 3.5G phone. It supports the High-Speed Downlink Packet Access (HSDPA) standard, which enables it to transfer data at 1.4-1.8 Mbps, around three to five times faster than 3G or 384 Kbps DSL. And HSDPA is not a standard that's still waiting in the wings. Globe Handyphone already supports it. With this speed you can make smooth video calls and browse the internet faster than even most wired connections.

It's a 5 megapixel auto-focus digital camera. Not so long ago 5 megapixels were a lot to have on a dedicated digital camera. Now, the clarity and resolution that was previously only available on dedicated digital cameras is now built in the N95, thanks to its 5 MP CMOS sensor, Carl Zeiss optics, 20x digital zoom and integrated LED flash. And for video calls and self portraits, there's the ubiquitous .3 megapixel VGA camera up front.

It's a video camera. It captures a MPEG-4 VGA video at 30 frames per second. And with 8 GB of storage you can store hours of video. Perfect for those wannabe porn stars. :-)

It's an MP3 player. You can use ordinary headphones via the N95's built-in standard 3.5 mm minijack. It also has built-in stereo speakers, a graphic equalizer as well as 3D audio, and the sound quality easily rivals that of dedicated MP3 players. It has built-in FM radio reception as well.

It's an internet access device. You can access the internet via GPRS, EDGE, 3G, or HSDPA through your provider's network. If you're near any wireless LAN, you can also go online via the N95's built-in Wi-Fi.

It's a GPS receiver. You can easily determine your position anywhere in the world through the United States' network of GPS satellites.

It's a hand-held game machine. It plays Next Generation N-Gage games.

It's a flash drive. Plug it in any PC with the supplied USB cable, and voila! you have an instant storage device. The cable isn't even proprietary, you can use any cable with a standard mini USB end. So much for that Pop-Port nonsense.

And with 8 GB of internal flash memory, you can store literally thousands of songs, pictures, videos, or any other data.

It also supports Infrared and Bluetooth transfers.

There's hardly anything this mobile phone can't do. It can do so much that Nokia doesn't even call it a cellphone. Nokia calls it a multimedia computer, and given its capabilities it seems like an apt description. All of this functionality in a package smaller and lighter than my old favorite, the Nokia 6600.

Of course, it's not perfect. It costs as much as some notebooks, so you really have to ask yourself first, do you want a high-end phone, or a low-end notebook?

At the end of the day, the N95 can still be considered a bargain. How so? Well, if you buy an ordinary cellphone, a digital camera, a video camera, an MP3 player, a PDA, and a GPS receiver, almost certainly you'll pay a lot more than if you just bought an N95. It's all those features which make the N95 a relatively good buy.

Aside from its rather astronomical price, there isn't much to nitpick about it. I was a bit concerned about the durability of the slider mechanism, but it seems sturdy enough for daily use. Battery life appears to be a tad more brief than the battery life of my N70, but if you can restrain yourself from playing with all the features, the battery will last a good three days or so, about the same as any other phone. At this price level, rapid obsolescence can become a concern, but given its long list of features, it's a safe bet that you won't be needing to upgrade from it anytime soon.

Of course, I've said that before, but I always end up upgrading nonetheless. Let's just see what new technological breakthroughs they will come out with in the next year or so.

Some pictures:

Black beauty.


Push the slider up and out comes the keypad.


Push the slider down and you get a set of multimedia controls. The screen automatically changes to landscape mode as well.


5 megapixel camera and built-in flash. No lens cover though.

A word of warning. They say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, and with all the praise the N95 has been getting, it's no surprise that a lot of imitations and fakes have been flooding the market lately.

If you're out to get your own N95, you better know how to tell the real deal from the bootleg ones. Check this article out for more information.

Some fakes have become so good that they can easily fool the untrained eye. When in doubt, just purchase your phone from an authorized Nokia dealer. And always remember, if the price is too good to be true, it's because it probably is.

Reposting this for whatever good may come out of it. :-)

Anyone here interested in purchasing a plot of commercial land located along Commonwealth Ave. in Quezon City? It's my father's property, and it has a lot area of 2,844 sqm., with a number of residential improvements. The frontage is a bit on the small side, at 14 m., but it directly faces Commonwealth Ave.

The lot has been on the market for quite a while, but since the real estate market has been down for some time now...well you know how it is.

Just in case you're interested, or know someone who is, please feel free to leave a comment or to email me at ronallandottk@yahoo.com. To cut the hassle, would prefer to deal with direct buyers only. Sometimes it can be quite hard dealing with a multitude of brokers and middlemen...you know how that is too. :-)

You can also call 9315575 if you have any inquiries.

Siteplan of the property.


Aerial view. The road at the top of the photo is Commonwealth Avenue.


Here's a tighter aerial shot. The improvements are clearly visible from this distance.

And just in case you're wondering, no, I didn't hire an airplane or a helicopter. Used Google Earth instead. :-)

I observe with mild interest and amusement as a number of men manhandle a locked Ford Expedition into a parking space just behind the building I work in. Checking the time I figured they spent more than half an hour jacking, tugging and pushing at the shiny mass of metal, with their strains finally coming to an end with the large SUV being coaxed into one of the parking spaces.

Querying one of the security personnel, I was told the the vehicle was forcibly repossessed after the owner failed to make the payments on the vehicle. Apparently the owner wasn't happy about his SUV being repossessed, so he neglected to unlock the doors, much less give them the keys.

As if it really mattered whether he gave them the keys or not.

It's a tad ironic, don't you think?

A towering 4x4 such as a Ford Expedition, in the vast majority of cases, is really nothing more than extravagant status symbol, an expression of affluence, an utter display of the triumph of decadence over practicality. Weighing in at over 6,800 kg, or approximately 15,000 lbs, it weighs about the same as six or seven subcompacts. Being approximately 2 m wide, more than 5 m long at about 2 m tall, it's probably bigger than the tin shacks of a lot of destitute and impoverished Filipinos. With a massive 5.4 liter V8, it devours fuel faster than Homer Simpson at an all-you-can-eat fish restaurant, not to mention the fact that compared to most vehicles it probably belches out tons more greenhouse gases. If you think global warming is a myth, then this is the car for you! Further contributing to the irony is that most owners will probably never even drive their Expeditions off-road.

So who would ever buy a vehicle like a Ford Expedition?

Why, only the ridiculously rich of course. No one without oodles of cash should even consider buying one of these babies.

Which leads us back to the situation at hand.

In front of me stands a repossessed Ford Expedition.

It doesn't seem quite right.

Status symbols come naturally if you can afford them. A lot of wealthy people I know even deliberately shun status symbols, preferring the anonymity of being just like everyone else, possibly for their own protection as well.

Unfortunately, some people can't wait. There are people who waste no time or money in projecting themselves as more than what they really are. In this case, that they are more wealthy than they really are. That's why they buy status symbols...even if they can't afford them.

And sadly, the poor slob who owns (owned?) this SUV apparently falls among the latter.

Moral of the story? Don't pretend to be something or someone you're not. Never buy something you can't afford. And never, ever buy a luxury SUV if you can't make the payments.

The past few months my son has been having problems with his Sony Ericsson K310i, specifically with the unit shutting down intermittently even though the battery wasn't discharged yet. "Automatic shutdown" was my son's term for it.

Over the weekend, the cellphone finally decided to give up the ghost, showing nothing than a continuously blinking white screen when powered up.

Not wanting to be stuck with a high tech paperweight, and with unit still under warranty, I promptly called up Globe Handyphone for advice on how to have the cellphone serviced. I was instructed to bring the malfunctioning unit to a Sony Ericcson service center, and as it turned out, the closest service center to my location is the Sony Ericsson Concept Shop in SM North EDSA. My son and I were off to visit it the next day.

I was never a Sony Ericsson person, as I've always preferred Nokia cellphones instead. The thing with Nokia is, if you know how to use one model, then you wouldn't have any problems using any other Nokia model, thanks to its semi-standardized user interface. Sony Ericsson cellphones also have semi-standardized user interfaces, but since I got my first Nokia almost a decade ago, I've never really seen the need to move on to another brand.

I've owned more than a dozen Nokia cellphones in the past ten years or so, and I've never really had a unit go south on me, whether it be a lowly 5110 or a high-end Nseries phone. I guess Nokias are just as tough as nails. Nothing against Sony Ericssons, but they just don't strike me as being as durable as Nokias. Then again, I really wouldn't know since I've never really owned one. That being said, having a unit less than a year old break down on my son doesn't really fill me with confidence.

Sony Ericsson phones are quite notable in the fact that they have better feature sets than their Nokia contemporaries, especially with their low to mid-range products. Nokia is notorious for releasing several similar models over a particular model series with compromises in features here and there, without any unit within a range overwhelmingly better than the rest. While this may have the advantage of having more models to choose from, the downside is that Nokia cellphones depreciate in value more rapidly than comparable models from Sony Ericsson, which tend to retain their value better over the long term.

Of course, it's not necessarily an apples to apples comparison. For the most part any cellphone from Sony Ericsson or Nokia, or for that matter, any other contemporary brand will serve your needs quite well, it's just a matter of preference and/or brand loyalty. For my son, that preference was for Sony Ericsson.

I was somewhat taken aback when we got to the Sony Ericsson Concept shop at Cyberzone, SM North EDSA. They had around four people tending to customers in the sales area, while there where none at the service area, despite a line of people waiting to have their units serviced.

The wait wasn't excrutiatingly long though, only about 10 to 15 minutes. It would have helped though if there were people at the service counter though. For at least 10 minutes there wasn't anyone. Hmmm. Around four or so employees at the sales area. No one at the service area. I guess for them sales must be more important than service.

Where the heck is everyone?

Eventually our number was up, and it was determined that my son's cellphone was in need of a software update. Thankfully, there were no hardware problems whatsoever. We left the unit to be fixed and went on with the rest of our day. Minor quibbles include my having to drop by a Globe business center to get a certification that I got my son's unit from them, and the fact that no one was answering the phone at the Sony Ericsson shop when I tried to follow up the unit's status, despite repeated attempts. Eventually someone did answer, but again, the less than enthusiastic treatment I got wasn't exactly confidence inspiring.

Later in the day we picked up the unit, and it was now working. Being under warranty I didn't have to spend anything on the repair. I think an out of warranty software update would have set me back around P500.00 or so, and while this isn't a huge amount by today's standards, it's still quite a sum to be saved by having them perform the update under warranty.

All wasn't well though. My son was quite disappointed over the fact that all of his contacts, messages, tones, pictures, games and other files were lost, proving that you can never be too young to be a victim of technology.

But I guess he'll just have to live with that.

His phone now works flawlessly, and even the automatic shutdowns which have plagued the unit before have disappeared. At the end of this adventure, this was the only thing that really mattered.

As for me, I'll stick with Nokia.

I've never had any reason to visit a Nokia service center in the more than ten years I have owned Nokia phones, and hopefully, I'll never have to visit one in the future.

If you're wondering why I haven't posted anything new lately, it's because my computers at home were all down until only a few days ago. Went through a couple of hardware upgrades which, unfortunately, didn't really go as smooth as I was expecting them to turn out.

The first upgrade involved the video card of the PC my son uses to play games with (Athlon XP 2400+, 1.5 GB RAM, 256 MB Radeon 9550). He started complaining over the slow frame rates he was getting with some newer games, particularly the resource-hungry RTS World in Conflict. The game is actually playable when using low graphics settings, but there's nothing quite as pathetic as playing a computer game with all the settings turned down to low.

After some research, I figured the GPU with the best bang-for-the-buck was the NVIDIA GeForce 7600 GS, with its 12 pixel pipelines, 5 vertex shaders, and a core running at 400 MHz. All I need now is to find one, particularly one which runs on an AGP bus.

I soon realized that AGP video cards are bit on the scarce side nowadays, with most computer stores stocking up on PCI-Express video cards instead. Even if a shop carried AGP video cards, more often than not their available stock was limited to low-end models, with chipsets such as the GeForce FX 5500 or the Radeon 9550. After going through quite a number of shops at Virra Mall in Greenhills, I finally managed to snag an AGP Inno3D GeForce 7600GS with 256 MB of GDDR2.

Unfortunately, after installing it, I realized the particular unit that was sold to me had a factory defect, as the images being displayed by the card were corrupted and essentially gibberish. The shop promptly replaced it the following day with a fully functional unit, but the aggravation from a failed upgrade and the effort to return the video card was already had.

The second upgrade was with my main PC (Athlon 64 3000+, 1 GB RAM, 256 MB GeForce 6800 LE). Apparently 1 GB of RAM doesn't seem to be enough for my purposes, as I almost always end up using the paging file (and with it the resultant loss in speed), especially for some newer games.

I bought a pair of Elixir (a somewhat generic brand) 1 GB DDR400 DIMMS. I figured generic was okay, since I don't really overclock to the max and the modules were dirt cheap (actually they were the cheapest that I could find). As it turned out, either both of the modules I got were defective, or they really weren't that compatible with my MSI motherboard, as I got nothing but intermittent hangs while installing Windows XP or running Memtest86+. Again, the defective or incompatible modules were promptly replaced by the shop the following day, though I opted to pay extra for Apacer branded modules instead. The new ones worked perfectly.

Moral of the story? If you plan on upgrading your computer, make sure you plan for all contingencies, particularly a botched upgrade. And also make sure you don't have anything pending in the pipeline. There's nothing quite as annoying as having an important file stuck on your PC's hard drive, and being unable to access it because of an upgrade which went sour.

No regrets though. I have two faster PCs. It's almost worth the aggravation. Emphasis on almost.

Links:

Inno3D GeForce 7600GS AGP Review

What's wrong with this picture?


I guess we Filipinos were never really good at following rules.

I've won! I've won! - NOT.

The past several months I've been getting quite a number of text messages on my cellphone informing me that I have won a sum of money in some sort of raffle, and instructing me to call back and look for the person whose name was mentioned in the message.

If it sounds to good to be true, that's because it is.

This is what is known as a text scam.

Text scams first came out a number of years ago, with the rising popularity of cellphones with SMS capability (and consquently the number of suckers who own one). Presently, with approximately 30 million cellphones all over the country, scams like these are quite common.

This message is obviously bogus, and was designed by some unscrupulous souls to appeal to the avaricious and gullible among us for the purpose of scamming them into giving up hard currency, for processing or facilitating the release of their so-called "prizes".

Sadly, a lot of people have already fallen prey to this modus operandi, no doubt overcome by the glorious promise of easy money. Of course, the ones getting the easy money are the perpetrators of this scam.

Here are some examples of the messages I have received, complete with the numbers that sent them:

D'AUDITOR's of PHIL.CHARITY FOUNDATION nform u dat ur Celfon no. Won Php950,000.00 2nd prize Winner draw last:03/01/07 Call Me Now I'm Atty.LIONARDINO V VALDEZ

Sender: +639176170683
Sent: 12:18PM 03-04-2007

Congrt's ur simcrd # Won P560,000,n our 2nd Anv,Fre,Rafle Drw last:June 25-07 frm:Millionaires Club Inc.4 more info&dtails call me nw!Im SEC, EDGAR LEDESMA

Sender: +639053143420
Sent: 01:29PM 07-09-2007

D'AUDITORS of GMA CHARITY FOUNDATION nform u dat ur CELFON nos. WON P 950,000.00 2nd prize winner,drw last.05-24-2007 PLS CALL ME NOW,IM,MRS LELIBETH SANCHEZ

Sender: +639174653165
Sent: 10:50PM 05-26-2007

(Notice):Ur simcard #won P680,000 In Our 2nd Anv PreRAffle drw last:Oct,31/07 frm Millionaires Club inc. 4 more infor &dtails call me nw! im sec,VIC E CUEVAZ

Sender: +639165536075
Sent: 6:37PM 11-04-2007

If you receive a SMS similar to the ones above, it's bogus. Simple as that.

Some dead giveaways that the text message is a scam are the following:

1. The number used is eleven digits, for example, 0916xxxxxxx. Legitimate promos typically use a four digit number.

2. Did you join any raffle promo? If not, how can you possibly win?

3. If you take the bait and decide to call, the person on the other line usually asks for a prize processing fee, a tax payment on the prize, or something similar to be deposited in some bank account.

4. Personally, I feel that if a company can afford to give away hundreds of thousands or even millions of pesos via text, it would be safe to assume that that company can easily afford to hire an employee who knows proper spelling and grammar.

If you see all these warning signs and you still go on and part with your money, shame on you. You probably deserve to have your money taken away from you.

Unfortunately, despite searching the internet particularly the websites of the providers and government agencies concerned, other than some advisories warning the public, there doesn't seem to be a clear-cut mechanism on how to report or apprehend these criminals. It would be nice if there's a way to at least report the numbers used so these numbers get blocked, or if there was some task force somewhere which specializes in entrapment operations against the perpetrators of this fraud.

If you happen to hear of anything, let me know. For now, all we can do is be careful.

So, what do you do if you get such a message?

The easiest thing to do is to ignore it, delete the message right then and there.

If you're feeling a bit sadistic, you could text or call back and give the sender a piece of your mind, but then again why bother? You'll be the one paying for the text or call.

Just be vigilant, and don't believe everything that you receive on your phone.

Walang manloloko kung walang nagpapaloko.